Bloodied and unbowed

Not many people make an hour and a quarter documentary about their own public sacking, but Oona King is not most people.

Screening last night on the fringe of the Labour party conference in Brighton was The Battle for Bethnal Green, a 75-minute fly-on-the-wall film about the titanic struggle between Ms King, the sitting Labour MP in the east London seat and Labour outcast and Respect antiwar candidate George Galloway, whose victory provided surely the most dramatic moment of the May 5 election.

Making a film where everyone knows the outcome was, as host Trevor Phillips, of the Commission for Racial Equality, told the gathering, a tough challenge.

But, in fact, a couple of new nuggets did emerge: on election night, as news of Oona's defeat began to percolate, her campaign team "leaked" to the BBC the news that she had lost by 2,000 votes - in order to make her eventual 800-vote margin appear less dramatic.

The film also provides audio - via Oona's microphone - from the famous hustings where, at the height of the vitriolic campaign, photographers snapped the two candidates breaking a frosty silence with a brief chat.

As Ms King says the two of them must tone down their rhetoric, Gorgeous George whispers: "These pictures will look good tomorrow."

The star of the film is Oona's father, Preston, a former black rights activist from the States, who, in a brief cameo, spars verbally with an aggressive Muslim youth on the street who tells him all voters are infidels.

The other revealing aspect comes from behind the camera, as the film-maker - a childhood friend of Ms King's - becomes progressively more disgruntled with her subject.

Already disagreeing with her over the war, she seems unimpressed with Oona's answer that, by backing George Bush over Iraq, Mr Blair will have some clout to improve the lot of the Palestinians. She also feels something close to disgust at how Oona and her team jump on the media opportunity provided by a local OAP, possibly (or probably not, as it turned out) attacked by Respect canvassers.

As Oona loses, it's impossible not to feel a tweak of sympathy for her very public humiliation, but, with the former MP appearing at virtually every fringe meeting at Brighton, it's hard to suppress the feeling that the credits have yet to roll on the Oona King story.